2000-02-11 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- A long-simmering corruption scandal has widened to encompass a swath of the Los Angeles Police Department, with the district attorney saying yesterday that his office has now found more than 40 people who were wrongly prosecuted, and in several cases shot, through police misconduct.

The district attorney, Gil Garcetti, also said in a news conference that the investigation had now spread beyond the inner-city station where it began.

Garcetti said prosecutors would soon go to court to ask that another 6 to 10 convictions be thrown out and that the victims be released. Thirty-two cases have already been overturned.

Garcetti said in an interview late yesterday that he expected more cases to be overturned and more prosecutors to be assigned to the investigation. The police have disclosed that perhaps 100 cases might have been tainted by planted evidence, false testimony or other police abuses.

More important, Garcetti said, the investigation has gone beyond the Rampart Division, a station west of downtown in a gang-infested neighborhood where the misconduct was first uncovered.

He disclosed that there had been a "breakdown" in the cooperation between police and prosecutors. The police, he said, have started to resist prosecutors' efforts to gather information, a sign of the rising tensions as some in the Police Department seek to limit the damage.

So far, it has been disclosed that officers shot an unarmed man in handcuffs, planted guns, drugs and other evidence on suspects, lied in court testimony to frame innocent people and stole drugs and money.

Even before yesterday, the scandal was the most serious instance of corruption in the history of the troubled Los Angeles Police Department, but its growing breadth and the systematic nature of the corruption, which apparently went unchecked for years, have raised questions about the ability of the department to monitor its officers.

"The structure was in place there that allowed this" to go on for so long, Garcetti said.

His remarks underscored the political tensions underlying the investigation, which has pitted Garcetti's office and its supporters against the Police Department and its backers.

Bernard C. Parks, the chief of police, has publicly hinted that Garcetti was moving too slowly. Parks has tried to pre-empt critics by suggesting plans to improve internal monitoring in the department. Several weeks ago, he urged Garcetti to overturn 99 tainted cases quickly and to file charges against three officers.

The tensions escalated yesterday morning when the Los Angeles Times carried two articles that quoted from secret interviews with investigators of Rafael Perez, a former officer who has admitted to years of abuses and who revealed the incidents after being arrested on charges that he had stolen cocaine.

The articles quoted Perez, who is cooperating with police in order to reduce his sentence, as saying that nearly the entire anti-gang unit at the Rampart Division, including supervisors, was involved. He is also quoted as saying that officers at other police stations were engaged in abuses. The newspaper provided details of a case in which the police were reported to have shot an unarmed gang member, then planted a gun near him as he bled to death.

The articles were a major embarrassment to the Police Department.

Garcetti would not go into detail, but said, "I didn't read anything in the articles that was inaccurate."